Random Stuff I'm Thinking About

Sunday, April 15, 2012

I've spent most of my life doing photography. Taking pictures in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons. More lately, one of the things I've come to appreciate about photography is that it allows you, or encourages you, to look at things in an additional way. To consider the thing you're looking at. To analyze it.

I know I'm not alone in this feeling, and I think it's a big part of the reason that a lot of people become immersed and involved with photography as an art and a skill, rather than just as a means to gather keepsakes. It is a formalizing of seeing things. A disciplining.

For what it's worth.

Over the past month or two, I've started painting. Mainly I did this as a way to produce larger outputs. I can't afford a big printer, or lab fees to send stuff out. And that process annoys me anyway. There's too much of bringing in other influences into the work. The lab people, the equipment, the remoteness of it all. But mainly it was the money. I needed a way to produce output for shows and for sale that I could afford. I started by producing segmented prints, on my letter size printer, and stitching those together. I had to get paints to touch up the seams on these stitched prints, and after a few of those, I realized I was painting quite a bit of the image anyway, so why not cut out the intermediate step? So I just started painting the images. It was surprising and delightful how easily this process came to me, but that's the topic of another article, I think.

I'm on my twenty fourth painting now, and I've gotten pretty good at reproducing the image I have in my head. And that's got an additional nice thing about it: I don't have to be able to find a corporeal thing to take a photo of anymore. If I want, I can image something straight out of my imagination. But I've noticed something: I've been looking at other painters, and I notice that most of them have a style. A way of reducing and reproducing things. And I wondered if I should do this. Because what I've been doing is methodically and deliberately trying to be faithful to the image, trying to take myself, my influence of hand and brush-stroke, out of the final output.

So I was thinking about that. And I think that maybe it's a side effect of all that photography. All that time spent reproducing the world. Learning to see things in a certain way. It's led to me having that as my 'style'. So I guess I'll be happy about that and not worry about it. Not worry that my paintings don't look like art. That they look just like my photographs. Because I guess it doesn't matter what the output method is, they're all the result of what I see.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

I've seen several very good tutorials and step by step things on how people do their painting, and I found it useful, so I thought I'd do one to give back in some way. basically this is going to be a series of pictures as I go along. possibly when I'm done I'll spiff it up some.

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wood panel with stick cradle on the back keeping it flat. also provides a nice place to hang the thing from.

the wood has a layer of plaster that I sanded flat, but then that's very absorbant, so I had to paint a bunch of layers of paint before it stopped soaking in. you can't do it contiguously (otherwise it starts dragging around wet paint/plaster), so to keep track of where the paint's been, I switch colors at each pass.

once there's a nice surface, painting in something appropriate for a ground color, mostly to cover up the weird camo look from the prior step.

here's the panel ready to paint on.

I like to have something to act as a model, in this case it's a boat in a boathouse. since I don't really have access to those, I made my own model. this is a small sailboat out of a chunk of wood and a chopstick and some string.

here's the floor of the boathouse gluing up.

there's the boat with some decorative paint.

boat in room.

painting the room to get correct light behavior.

almost done painting the boathouse...

a few shots playing around trying to get the basic composition and lens settings and so on.

once I got things about right, make a sketch onto the panel.

after some initial thinking/looking, I decided I needed a better model shot, this time I added smoke to the room and put a colored lens (safety glasses yellow) in front of one of the strobes).

colored in the rough sketch. broadly colors for surfaces, to keep them differentiated more than as final color.

rough pass with black and white.

whiting over the windows on the back wall that I decided didn't look right.

redefined the edges

tweaked the edges so that they looked good to the eye.

a pass with a fine brush

another fine brush pass

trying to start getting the tones and color right.

balancing out the tones and light levels. screwed up a few areas, adding detail here and there.

put some color on the floor and developed the light behavior further (sort of ray tracing in my head).

lotta time just doing minor tweaks

another tweaking pass with black white and yellows. to balance the tones.

Friday, March 2, 2012

To prove a point, I've not done my usual due diligence and care on this work. I have presented below the bare minimum, absolute first draft of my thoughts, as I thought them for me, with no consideration or respect of audience. I hope this helps to demonstrate the key idea of this essay. I think you'll agree, it's not as readable, or palateable or interesting as what I usually post here. And that difference is the art and passion and care and attention that is the subject at hand.

Pinterest is an indication or staw on camels back of creative works.

Like music that started as a live thing, was temporarily controled by business, until they got greedy and minimized the artists and then the whole model fell apart. Now musicians only perform live anymore.

Same thing is happening to other media. Books will become books again. Artwork will become artwork again. Pinerests is the thing that will drive visual artists away like napster did to musicians. Kindle will drive authors away to print again. –

partly because: in this model, any version online is intrinsically infringing. No ambiguity.

Because to the artist, it is always s the solid object that matters. All the stuff online now is only publicity, and it has reached the point where the public thinks that's all there is, and that they shouldn't have to pay for it.

So: if you want to see real art, in the coming future, you'll have to see it online. -know that what you see online is only amateur, bad, uninspired, false. Commercial. Art will come back to being real,a nd to experience it you'll have to do your part.

Has reached the point as an artist, both storytelling and pictures, that people demand that I do work, and do other things that indicate that they value it, but absolutely refuse to acknowledge that it has value. Regularly have scoldings to the effect that I should do it for the 'exposure' or 'flattery' (the pinterest arguments). But exposure in service of what? No: I, and many people like me (creative people) will gravitate away from stealable media, (as musicians have) and towards real. So: from that other side: if you're getting it for free, you're not getting the good stuff. The only stuff that's free is stuff that the creator and the audience have both agreed is not worth anything.

And on the flip side: if you find something valuable as an audience/consumer: it's your job to pay for it, actively if it's not being charged for. The act of paying will value the interaction for you and the artist. . - being an audience member isn't passive any more. You are a benefactor. The act of paying will enrich you, make you a part of the creativity, will give you more of the kind of thing you enjoyed from the artists and so on.

Right now: if you have a picture on your facebook page that isn't yours and doesn't link to the original (i.e. you downloaded it and re-uploaded it) then you're the problem. If you use pinterest, then you're the problem. If your entertainment reading is something you don't pay for, then you're the problem. It's so widespread and ingrained by a business culture that has no interest in preserving art or beauty or artistic merit or artists, that the general public doesn't even know it's wrong. But here's how you'll see it: like music, it will seem that there's not good work coming out any more. But it's not true, it's just gone offline. So: if you want to hear good music, go see a band. And in the near future, it'll be the same for all the other arts. If you think there's something missing, you're right. Go see an art show, buy a book, buy a painting, see a play, anything where there's a physical connection between you and the generator of the art.

Jenny Lorraine NielsenI see this interesting money-free exchange developing online-- the problem I suppose is that we aren't a money free culture so the era of the "paid" artist may be beginning to be dying out; but at the same time there may be a more even playing field for artists online now. I can upload music on Jamendo and I'm instantly on even ground with every other artist (at least for starters) without having to respond to a market which is demanding specific things

Dave DeHetreI use my own experience, and those of people I know: there comes a point where you are good enough that people start demanding of you, and expecting of you, as though they were paying you. -my belief is that this occurs when you've become good enough that your work has value. -to be in this situation is corrosive and there's no obvious solution. assuming that my experience is representative, the overall trend will be that as soon as someone is capable of creating something worthwhile, they will naturally withdraw from the environment that is corrosive to that creative process. it would be one thing if it was just a matter of indifference, but it's not, it's more active and caustic. say I don't write for money, it doesn't matter (and that's another topic really) but the point is: given that I can publish to people who value and respect what I do (offline), why would I publish online and suffer the burdens that come with that process? that online process stops repaying me as soon as become good enough that the feedback isn't helpful (i.e. I become someone who might raise the overal standard)

Dave DeHetreI didn't expect anything. But what I got was humiliated and denigrated. Not that I'm totally devastated or anything, but based on that sole bit of feedback as my 'payment' for doing such a thing, why would I keep doing it? was your total compensation for that textbook that you had a few people ridicule you?

Dave DeHetreI think my point may be escaping you because you're seeing this through the eyes of someone who has gotten paid money for the things you do. the new paradigm is that online stuff is done for other motivations/rewards.

Dave DeHetreI think it's worth pointing out that my complaint is against the business structures that profit off of the paradigm, and in particular the current thing with pinterest. I don't mind the free exchange with peers, but when there is somebody profiting, and manipulating the society to increase their profit at the expense of the participants, I rankle.

Dave DeHetrei.e. I didn't mind not getting paid for my pictures, but now that pinterest is stealing my pictures, making money off of them and blocking the consumer from even knowing that I am the creator, I've a) lost all incentive or hope of incentive, but also b) I now have a disincentive. in that I want to not help pinterest profit, and the only means I have to do that is to remove my work from their influence.

Dave DeHetreit's a pretty complex thing, but generally the problem is that they take content, strip any linkbacks or advertising, store it on their own servers and place ads alongside the content. there terms of service is such that the 'pinning' party is the one responsible for any infringment issues and that anything 'pinnned' is pinterest's property to monitize or do whatever they like with.

Traci BunkersI'll have to go read your blogpost, but just from reading the comments, I totally get where you are coming from Dave. And it's not even just the whole pinterest thing. I feel the same way when I take the time to make a tutorial art video--that's FREE--and then people leave snarky comments on youtube. If they didn't like it, they can just move one. But they'd rather be mean. So I have several issues here, and part of that is just people's behavior.

As an FYI, there is a code you can put in your blog/website that won't allow people to pin things to pinterest. I need to look on flickr, but I think from my understanding, anything that is deemed as copyrighted on there, they have already set up that it can't be pinned.